jquery autocomplete json and clickable link through

Question

I\'ve been at this for a while and I\'m making very slow progress mostly because my jquery skills need improvement, I am trying though :)

I have this code:

Answer 1

I managed to solve my problem, see below (NOTE: $token is a php variable). This allows me to send (specifically post) more than 1 variable to the php script that returns the JSON response. In my case this is necessary as I use a token to prevent unauthorised access to the search functionality.

jQuery(function() {
  jQuery("#search").autocomplete({
    source: function(request, response) {
      jQuery.ajax({
        url: "index.php?option=com_eat&view=search&format=raw",
        type: "post",
        dataType: "json",
        data: {
          search_string: request.term,            
          "'.$token.'": "1"
        },
        success: function(data) {
          response(jQuery.map(data, function(item) {
            return {
                url: item.url,
                value: item.name
            }
          }))
        }
      })
    },
    select: function( event, ui ) {
      window.location.href = ui.item.url;
    },
    minLength: 2
  });
});

The returned JSON from index.php?option=com_eat&view=search&format=raw looks like:

[{"url":"url1", "name":"name1"}, {"url":"url2", "name":"name2"}, ...]

The HTML on the page looks like so: